Electronic dictionary recommendations

Electronic Japanese-English dictionaries are very popular among Japanese language learners, and the subject of which to buy is a perennial classic as there are constantly newer and better models coming out. Having been through this myself, I thought I’d weigh in.

The last electronic dictionary I had was a Seiko Japanese-English-Chinese one, probably an older version of this model. I tend to like Seikos in general, for no particularly good reason. Anything that has Kōjien (広辞苑, the standard Japanese-Japanese dictionary) and Kanjigen (漢字源, the standard kanji dictionary) is pretty much good enough in my book.

But when that Seiko inexplicably died after only 2 years and I was out ¥30,000 and left with no dictionary, I vowed never to buy another electronic dictionary again. I don’t need portability—pretty much the only time I need dictionaries these days is when I’m sitting at my computer. So I bought the PC version of Kōjien (also works natively on OS X, and on Linux via 3rd party software) and called it a day. Between Kōjien and the various other dictionaries available online, I find that I just don’t need a portable electronic dictionary.

Major dictionaries available online:

• Eijirō EJ/JE
• Daijirin and Daijisen JJ, Progressive EJ/JE, New Global EJ, New Century JE
• EDICT EJ/JE

Not online, but still very useful:

• The suite of JE/EJ, JJ, and thesauruses that come bundled with Mac OS X

I find that I don’t need much else these days, but if I need bigger and better dictionaries then I will likely invest in standalone PC or paper ones.

Ok, what if I needed portability? Here is what I would think about:

• Forget pen input entirely. It’s a waste of time for most kanji, especially if you don’t know the correct stroke orders. The fastest way to search for kanji is search by component name (部品読み検索). Of course this assumes that you know the names of kanji radicals. This assumption may not apply to you, but I recommend learning them if you’re serious about kanji proficiency.
• Kōjien and Kanjigen are the bare necessities for me. Some models substitute Daijirin (大辞林), which I find to be extremely limited in comparison.
• I don’t need color screens, 1-seg tuners, media readers, etc. If I was even remotely interested in that, I’d jump straight to a proper multimedia device like an iPod touch, an Eee PC, or something like that.
• “Bonus” dictionaries like English phrasebooks (とっさの英会話 or whatever), encyclopedias, etc. are also irrelevant to me.
• After considering the above items, the only other spec I really look at is the number of words in the English-Japanese and Japanese-English dictionaries. I don’t have a preference regarding Genius vs. Progressive vs. whatever, but some dictionaries are surprisingly limited.

So, those are my thoughts on electronic dictionaries. My needs are fairly different from the average language learner, but hopefully this will be useful to someone.

PS. I lied. I actually do use a dictionary on-the-go occasionally. It’s the crappy JJ one that came with my AU phone. But it often doesn’t have the words I’m looking for, so I wouldn’t recommend basing a cell phone purchase on this particular feature.